By: Neville Hodgkinson
Source: The Daily Guardian https://epaper.thedailyguardian.com/view/1714/the-daily-guardian/14
Dated: November 30, 2024
Some people are able to move through life with lightness and ease, while others remain uncomfortable and over-stressed. Psychologists tell us that a key difference between the two is the degree of self-respect, or lack of it, in which we hold ourselves.
Not surprisingly, those who grow up in a loving and supportive environment tend to carry that love and support with them, internally, into adulthood, while early trauma can leave us with an abiding sense of insecurity. The good news is that those who fall into the latter group, can overcome their handicaps through making conscious, positive choices in the ways they think, feel and act. I learned this many years ago while working full-time as a medical correspondent on national newspapers in the UK.
I met doctors who could transform the lives of their patients by teaching them to have more respect for themselves, and how to resist what one cardiologist called ‘people poisoning’. When we lack self-respect, we allow others to drag us down further through their negativity, or poison. When we lack the wisdom to see what is going on, we let that poison enter our own psyche.
In contrast to that, a healer such as Louise Hay, founder of the hugely successful Hay House Publishing company, was able in the early 1980s to cure hundreds of young gay men from Aids. She did it through filling them with love, and an understanding of how the homophobia of the society in which they grew up, had made them vulnerable to thinking, feeling and behaving in ways that were self-destructive, damaging their immune system.
Our shared humanity means we are all loving and wise at heart, but these qualities become hidden by other, negative tendencies over the course of time.
We can escape that negativity, and re-emerge our higher self, by connecting the mind to a source of love and light that becomes accessible when we disengage from ourphysical identity, and experience the self to be a soul or spirit, rather than a body. Meditation based on this kind of understanding makes it easier to step aside from the ‘noise’ in the brain, produced by worry and fear.
The healing power that then becomes available is very great. Because of the way it boosts one’s inner sense of stability, the ups and downs of everyday life become more manageable. Life can be seen more as a game, and there is a greater readiness to learn the rules, rather than stubbornly insist on being right.
Professor Donald Hoffman, a cognitive neuroscientist in the USA, developed a concept that maintains, that rather as with ancient understandings from the East, the physical world is not what it seems, but an illusion, comparable to the simulated worlds created within virtual reality computer games. The real world, in his view, comprises what he calls ‘conscious agents’ – individuated units of consciousness, of varying complexity. Fundamentally, we are not material beings, but souls having a human experience.
Virtual reality headsets give users an experience of a computer-generated, 3D environment. They are responsive to eye and head movements and can take players into an incredible experience of moving through a simulated world. Could it be that our head and brain, in fact the whole body, is comparable to such a headset, enabling us to experience life in the 3-d world of time and space?
Hoffman and his team are working on a mathematics that exists outside space-time, and which he believes is the source code for the game of life that takes place within it. ‘Consciousness is first. Matter and fields depend on it for their very existence.’ Even today’s conventional physics tells us that you do not get a single particle without the information that allows it to manifest from the quantum field.
When I take off the headset of the brain and body, I can know the true self, the core of my being. This is where my highest potential can be found. This true self is benevolent - unlike the ego, the limited identity that gets constructed through the brain, and which becomes very demanding when I identify with the headset and get lost in the game. I need the headset, but I also need to recognize that it is not the essence of who I am. When I am able to take it off from time to time, it can bring a blissful and deeply nourishing relief.
It is an encouraging feature of our times that some scientists as well as philosophers and spiritual aspirants are addressing these issues, recognizing that to restore a sense of the sacred may be fundamental in creating a better world.
Neville Hodgkinson
UK based author and journalist,
and a long-time student of Rajyoga.
